
Show Notes
Columnist, podcast and book reviewer for The London Times James Marriott joins Jack Aldane on Episode 5 to discuss The War Against Cliché , an anthology of Martin Amis's reviews and essays from 1971 to 2000. It was the book that changed James's approach to life, and especially writing.
James tells Jack why, despite his never having been a devotee to Amis the novelist, Amis's journalism contains by far some of the cleverest, funniest and most galvanising opinions on literature you’ll ever encounter.
The War Against Cliché remains, he says, the book which makes him want to write more than any other, and without which producing book reviews would be a whole lot less fun.
FOLLOW US ON TWITTER: @mymartinamis FIND US ON YOUTUBE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from My Martin Amis
Leon Craig's debut novel The Decadence was published in September of 2025, with the paperback due to be published in August 2026.
Many a male Amis reader owes his smoking habit to the author.
For this episode of My Martin Amis, we're plugging into the London recording studio of the New Statesman magazine.
David Szalay won the Booker Prize for his sixth novel Flesh in 2025. In this tense, spare, frictionless work of fiction, he drip feeds us the story of the laconic male protagonist Istvan, who spends his youth in a juvenile facility in Hungary before eventually finding his way into a fractured family situated among the upper echelons of London's wealthiest elites, where his fortunes soon unravel.
In the basement room of an East London flat one rainy January morning, Jack sat down with the Irish writer Rob Doyle to discuss the publication of his third novel, Cameo, and delve into his long and complex love for the work of Martin Amis.